Your online store is not only online sales, but also your business, which can be improved and optimized. If you want to learn how to save up to 500,000 rubles a year and achieve a new level of success, then this material is for you. Let's learn strategies and secrets that will help your online store to thrive and grow.

Many e-commerce market participants tend to be present not only at their own online stores, but also at various trading platforms. Presence on popular marketplaces and social networks significantly increases the company's turnover. How to effectively manage all sales channels and avoid the need to hire content managers for each channel? The emerging problem is important for executives and marketing directors in the field of e-commerce. It is necessary to justify the hiring of additional specialists and explain to top management why existing employees cannot cope with the volume of work or complete the tasks. We have identified patterns in content management.

1 The first obvious solution is manual filling. Hire a content manager who will fill out product cards, update prices, photos and characteristics on the website and marketplaces.

4. Business processes are as follows:

- Information about the brand, category and other aspects is combined into a task.

- The task is formulated to add products.

- Products are placed in the online store and on marketplaces.

- Waiting for confirmation of the task from the manager.

The reality looks like this

The task completion time is from 10 minutes to infinity.

From 50 to 150 product cards on 1 website are placed in 1 working day.

Errors when filling out the card.

A separate specialist is needed for each site.

In case of inaccuracies in the source data, it will be necessary to find each card and make changes.

Option 2. Working with tables

Creating a single database in excel is a great solution when the assortment is small. With proper skills, using a table becomes a fairly simple and convenient way to manage content. The search for goods is fast and does not require much time. Making changes takes a few minutes. At first glance, this is an optimal strategy, since the purchasing department generates prices and puts them in a file itself, content managers store a single database with characteristics in one place, all information is at hand.

What problems can you face

• Erroneous filling of the cell.
• Using an outdated version of the file with subsequent uploading to trading platforms.
• Slow opening on a PC and loading data to platforms due to the large weight of the file.

These content management business processes require hiring additional staff and control when scaling. The cost of one specialist who will post content is about 40K per month, not including the motivation system, more than 500K per employee per year. How to save these funds and avoid hiring unnecessary staff?

You can try to implement data aggregation via 1C or CMS of the site, making them the main data source, but there is another solution! Conte has contacted us with a similar request. Existing solutions on the market only complicated the process because the company sells more than 50,000 SKUs, operates in more than 30 countries. We proposed to develop a software solution for centralized management of large amounts of product data (PIM), which allowed them to manage all products from one place.Using their example, we will analyze how using one software product you can save on hiring employees and increase turnover.

Scaled, however, there is a solution that allows you to save and scale. For example, Conte used the developed software solution of the CONTEMATRIX PIM system. This system allows you to store and enrich product data, integrates with an online store and various platforms. With its help, you can manage all products from one place, quickly add and update products on all sites.

Many companies choose to store photo and video servers or clouds. A folder is created with many subfolders for each product that store photos.

The data storage system looks like this

The organization may vary, but the essence remains the same: the search for information is very difficult. In addition, there were often situations when the photo content was stored in different clouds, which significantly complicates the search for the necessary information.

We proposed to combine all the information within one card and implemented the ability to create several products in different colors with the storage of photos and videos for each model inside the product specification.

The ability to store photo and video content in high resolution has been implemented so that employees and customers of the company can download them to create advertising materials, upload to the website and social networks.

Filling in the characteristics and descriptions of goods on trading platforms requires a high level of concentration. In this regard, a system that stores all possible product characteristics in one place will reduce from 5 to 20 minutes for filling out characteristics in cards on the website, application, marketplace.

Inside the system, you can create an unlimited number of characteristics linked to product categories. It is possible to implement several fields with a product description for each site or upload one description to all sites.

The most popular topic for every business working with multiple sales channels. As part of the task set for us, a price management system has been implemented inside the PIM system with uploading to the B2B portal and the ConteShop online store. Each channel has its own card with a price and a deferred upload function. This means that you can update the cost of products in any of the channels immediately or at a specified date and time.

For online stores and manufacturers operating in different countries, a multilingual solution is especially relevant. When the translation of characteristics and descriptions into the native language of the population is required, the task becomes more complicated. You can hire native speakers to keep cards in PIM in the language you need for sales.

We have analyzed the system and existing business processes at Conte and identified possible points of optimization of business processes to reduce the workload of content managers and translators. The process was not fast, but now the implemented solution significantly reduces the time for updating information on all company resources, regardless of country and language.

Russian was the only language used in the system at the first stage, and two more languages were added later — English and German. In order not to hire translators to fill in the cards, we have created dictionaries with which we manage to automatically fill in the characteristics of goods at all without attracting additional resources. Russian is a simple system — the content manager fills in the characteristics in Russian, translations are pulled into the other languages from the dictionary.

As a result, when we open the card, we get the completed characteristics. The content manager only needs to add a description and the name of the product in each language.

The functionality allows you to manage the prices of the product range according to the criteria set by the content manager or sales specialist. The system allows you to flexibly generate the cost and generate PDF catalogs of products with specified prices. To automatically generate printed and presentation materials, you need to pass the design templates.

The solution opens up new opportunities for the sales department and will increase customer loyalty, relieve designers and the advertising department.

A convenient feature thanks to which you can change the placement category, characteristics and prices of thousands of products in a few minutes. The function is useful not only in case of a massive price change! Any errors made during filling due to inaccuracies arising at the stage of forming a product description by production can be corrected at the moment, on all resources, using the PIM system.

The main advantage of implementing a PIM system is the synchronization of the software product with trading platforms. For Conte, we have implemented two integrations with the company's systems – a b2b portal and the Conte Shop online store, thanks to which the volume of work has been reduced by 4-5 times. At the same time, the same style of content is maintained on both sites. Additionally, it is possible to connect the upload to any marketplace more than 10 times.

The system updates the information according to the schedule set by the content manager - as soon as possible and at the specified date and time. For example, you need to update prices and discounts on 01.01.24. In PIM, you can fill in the data with planned changes according to the necessary criteria, specify the date, and the system itself will update the data on all the resources you specified.

The implementation of the PIM system will optimize several business processes at once.

• Price formation. The pricing department can independently set prices for goods, without involving other employees to update the data.
• Creating and updating cards is 20 times faster. There is no need to open each site, search for a product, turn on the editing function, make edits and save.
• Reducing to a minimum the number of errors when transferring and updating data on all sites.
• The same style of product cards design on all resources, you will be remembered and recognized from the first second.

Thanks to the software product, you can keep the existing staff in the current state and scale without fear that the content department will not be able to complete tasks, and you will suffer losses due to fines of marketplaces, incorrectly filled descriptions, characteristics and prices.

Automation of routine processes will save money, team and scale traffic channels.